Month: May 2016

A leading clinical child psychologist, Dr. Brian Allen of the Center for the Protection of Children, Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital, has stood up to make an important statement. His recent article, still in early online form in the new journal Evidence-based Practice in Child and Adolescent Mental Health, is entitled “A RADical idea: A call to eliminate ‘attachment disorder’ and ‘attachment therapy’ from the clinical lexicon”.

Noting that those two terms are well entrenched in graduate education, parenting information, adoption work, and so on, Allen points out that “neither of…

Consistent with my lament here, it happened again Wednesday of last week: I had productive momentum on a post about something aggravating me in education, then this — ‘The left’s drive to push conservatives out of education reform’, by Robert Pondiscio — appeared on my Twitter feed. Anticipating both where the piece would likely go and the amounts of debate/reflection that would inevitably follow, I knew clicking on the thing would be committing to an investment that would knock me off track…but there was no way I could resist.

“Depending on whom you ask, degrees are either increasing in value or about to disappear into the dustbin of history,” writes Ryan Craig, managing director of University Ventures, on EdSurge News. Employers are “demanding more degrees while simultaneously saying degrees don’t matter.”

A new report by The Brookings Institution shows that the bachelor’s degree premium remains as high as ever. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs says the return on college is falling: “In 2010, students could expect to break even within eight years of finishing school. Since then, that has increased to nine years.”

Living in the heart of Silicon Valley–where lattes, croissants, and traffic gridlock prevail–I am surrounded daily by unrelenting optimism about the promise of technology making our lives better. I would guess, then, that fellow Valley-ites, if given the above choices, would pick “smart phones.” *

Were they to do so, they would be wrong. According to economic historian Robert Gordon, between 1870-1970 standards of living rose far more dramatically than the half-century since 1970. As he puts it:
The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political,…

Politicians promise to make college affordable for more people, writes Jeffrey Selingo in the Wall Street Journal. Yet many won’t earn a degree and nearly half of graduates are working jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree. What young people really need are

Young people need alternative routes to the education and training required for high-quality jobs. writes Selingo, author of There is Life After College.

If we define success in life by public acclaim and genius awards, then one approach is to come up with an idea that is simultaneously ground-breaking and plausible. Short of that, you can always come up with an idea that is, depending on how you characterize it, sometimes ground-breaking, and sometimes plausible.

This is how it works, Pick a startling “new” idea, whether, say, it’s that human intelligence consists of Seven Intelligences, or that some non-cognitive factor, say Grit, is one the biggest determiners of success. Proclaim it loud and clear. Give Ted Talks; win public acclaim…

A few weeks ago I published an op-ed in the NY Daily News about how purchasing decisions are made in educational technology. In this blog I want to elaborate on a couple of points I made.

First, regarding the overall point of the op-ed: most people got it, but a few took it to be a criticism of the use of technology in schools, and wrote me irate emails, tweets, or blog posts. The op-ed was a criticism of how tech purchasing decisions are made, not a blanket criticism of ed tech. “Ed tech” is such a broad category (like “explicit instruction” or “progressive pedagogy”) it seems improbable…